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When arts organizations are exiled from their homes, how can theatre practices grow roots over the long term? There is a repeated pattern of theatre companies losing their space—most often owing to reasons beyond their control. This loss is significant, but it is part of an unfortunately predictable cycle. This article asks what artists can do to help sustain artistic practice and the cultural life of our cities and spaces. It turns to creative placemakers Clay & Paper Theatre, MABELLEarts, and Derek Kwan as sources of wisdom. It shares a list of principles gathered from the lived experience of these artists and organizations, showing us delightful, practical, and poetic solutions for sustaining the arts ecosystem. This piece concludes with an up-and-coming creative placemaking initiative in Lakeview, the Art Shelter, led by Frog in Hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voice Your Celebration was a public computing installation at Canada's National Music Center, which offered a re-staging of computer code as a heterotopic form of participatory theatre. In the same way that the stage and the script can stand in between the audience on one hand, and actors and creators of a play on the other, in performances involving live digital art, pre-written code can also separate the coder and creators from the interacting audience. In this paper, we illustrate how Voice Your Celebration sought to address this divide by creating opportunities for the audience to become participants in the code itself by incorporating their voices and stories as integral parts of a widely used computational algorithm (Reynolds's algorithm) for simulating flocking behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While researching background material for Our Kind of Work (Thistledown 2011), a book about the first decade of Saskatoon's Twenty-fifth Street Theatre, I found myself re-thinking long held assumptions about the theatre company and the theatre community in Saskatchewan. My expectation was that the theatre company had an amicable relationship with the Saskatchewan Arts Board through the company's early years. Twenty-fifth Street Theatre was, after all, the only professional theatre company in the province dedicated to producing Canadian plays, and the Arts Board was there to foster the growth of Saskatchewan's artistic scene. The relationship between the theatre company and the Arts Board was less than friendly, however, as is shown in several archival documents. I also assumed that the fledgling theatre company would find an ally in the local newspaper The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, but the relationship was again unfriendly. Animosity between the theatre company and the newspaper culminated in a tense letter to a local reviewer which called for a public debate on the merits of one of the theatre company's productions. My archival research, performed in the Twenty-fifth Street Theatre Collection at the University of Saskatchewan Archives, taught me that my knowledge of the theatre's inner workings and of its relationships with other entities was far from complete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper addresses the notion of listening as a method of analysis. Our reflections stem from our development of an interactive sound art piece entitled Selfie Orchestra. This work is produced with sound, image, and GPS data gleaned from audience members' cell phones. It features an interactive 3D simulation of the La Friche la Belle de Mai district in Marseille, France. We begin with a brief description of this project, highlighting our attempts to provoke expanded forms of listening through the technological innovations at the heart of the work. We then turn to a theoretical examination of listening as a method for reflection and research in the social sciences, with specific reference to Henri Lefebvre's evocative concept of 'rhythmanalysis.' We reflect briefly on John Cage's work 4'33" (1952) and Max Neuhaus's Listen (1966) as precedent artworks that make space for attentive listening. We then contrast the open-ended interactivity promoted by these works with the more constrained forms we have been developing with Selfie Orchestra. We conclude with thoughts on how Selfie Orchestra demonstrates the strengths of listening as a method of analysis when the latter is understood following its ancient Greek conception as a form of 'loosening.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The performance venue of Two Planks and a Passion Theatre is 178 acres of varied farmland that surrounds the Ross Creek Centre for the Arts, near Canning, Nova Scotia. Forest, fields, and ponds provide creative contexts that influence the selection of works for development and production. After working as Artistic Director in this place for the last eleven years, I have a new perspective on theatre and its possibilities for immersion. Much of the work we create in Canadian theatre depends on the infrastructure we have built in order to deliver it. The theatre spaces built since 1950 have as much influence on our programming choice as personal taste, appetite for risk, or the over-arching social trends. In this paper I explore the notion that if the theatre is to be capable of bringing new perspectives and experiences to our audiences, we must attempt to strip it of the distractions and gimmicks that make the theatre a cardboard cut-out that resembles our contemporary world. When we consider immersion as our theatrical goal, we must ask ourselves: immersed into what? My central argument will be that surrounding audience members is not the same as engaging them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Stratford Festival Archives houses the largest single-theatre archive in the world, spanning more than sixty years of performing history, artefacts, production materials, and ephemera. Uniquely, the Stratford Archives also hosts a growing collection of palimpsestic composite scripts, master texts which feature every dramaturgical cut in the Festival's history layered together. Through consideration of high-quality scans of several Festival prompt-books, composite scripts, and archive features, this paper draws conclusions on the benefits and drawbacks of such an approach to stage-managerial material and examines the breadth of the prompt-book and composite script collection at the Stratford Festival Archives, with particular focus on the industry of archivist Nora Polley. Finally, this paper considers the question of copy-text compilation and the pitfalls in neglecting primary source materials with examples of prompt-books constructed from editorially moderated paperback editions rather than Quarto-Folio copy texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights the screening by the Drunk Feminist Films (DFF) of the cult classical musical "Spice World" at the Royal Cinema on April 23, 2016. Topics discussed include factor that contributed to DFF's move to hosting live events, how screenings can be analyzed, and the distribution of a paper program at each screening event with the rules of the audience's performative critiques.

Improvisation is often associated with shows like Whose Line Is It Anyway?, where the goal is to make the audience laugh. This paper expands the concept of theatrical improvisation in line with naturalist Gary Paul Nabhan's understanding of life on earth as 'the Great Improvisation' (9-10). Such a perspective sheds light on the benefits of pairing exercises derived from theatrical improvisation with environmental education (EE). Nabhan's epithet draws attention to the indeterminacy, the interconnection and the complexity shared by ecosystems and improv. troupes. This paper discusses the ways in which theatrical improvisation can encourage cooperation, collaborative learning, commitment to the moment and enjoyment in environmental education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the politics of translation at the 2014 panamerican ROUTES/RUTAS panamericanas international multiarts festival on human rights held in Toronto, Canada's Daniels Spectrum. Topics discussed include keynote speaker Diana Taylor's request for the interpreter to lower her volume which is seen to disrupt the invisibility of the act of translation, interpreter Olimpia Boido's interpretive labour and Brittany Chávez's presentation of her position paper in Spanish.

In this article, theatre artist/researcher Sonia Norris delves into the complicated question, "what is Canadian clowning?" Canadian clowns provide a diverse array of possibilities in answer to this question depending on their location, training, and linguistic and cultural background. However, the international clowning community often associates the term 'Canadian clowning' uniquely with the style of clown training and performance developed by Richard Pochinko in the seventies and eighties. Furthermore, their perception is that this style of clowning is a form of Indigenous or 'Amerindian' clowning. Norris scrutinizes this perception with Indigenous theatre artists Monique Mojica, Jani Lauzon, Rose Stella, and Gloria Miguel. Lauzon and Mojica worked with Richard Pochinko and his longtime collaborator Ian A. Wallace, Stella worked with Pochinko-trained teachers as part of her clown training, and Miguel's work with Spiderwoman Theater incorporates clown and Trickster. This discussion presents a re-contextualization of the term 'Canadian clown' and investigates the differences and connections between Pochinko's approach to clowning and Indigenous clowning and Trickster traditions in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The returned soldier has been a central figure in the first wave of Canadian plays to deal with the War in Afghanistan. Returned soldiers emerge as protagonists in Pierre-Michel Tremblay's Au Champ de Mars, Hannah Moscovitch's This Is War, and George F. Walker's Dead Metaphor while Evan Webber and Frank Cox-O'Connell Little Iliad deals with a soldier about to be dispatched to Afghanistan. The returned soldier, a damaged warrior and a witness to acts of unspeakable evil, is a liminal figure, connecting the passive humdrum of Canadian life to the brutality of the war zone far away. This paper looks at how such stories of the trauma of soldiers alternately participate in and critique a view of Canadian foreign policy as a series of innocent interventions in conflicts with violent, irrational enemies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In December 2012, the Montreal performance art platform the SensoriuM presented Botanical Animal, featuring multimedia artist Amanda Marya White, whose work explores the relationships between people, cities and ecology. In Botanical Animal, White introduced a closed-loop system for growing tomatoes. The stage for this performance was a university staff kitchen, in which White displayed photographs, botanical drawings, and plants. The performance was participatory, as the artist instructed and invited those in attendance to make canned tomatoes and salsa together. In this paper, I analyze Botanical Animal to demonstrate the ability of performance art to extend affective capacities by reconsidering relationships between human, animal, organic and inorganic forms. Botanical Animal incited gut reactions in participants, thus increasing affective capacities and encouraging its publics to reimagine their places within globalized cycles of food distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining records in the Stratford Festival Archive of costumes made for Juliets from 1960 to 2008, this paper discusses the significance of Juliet's costumes in themselves, in relation to costume changes that tell her story visually, and in broader social contexts: specifically, Canadian celebrity culture in 1992, inescapable Canadian politics in 1968, and the North American beauty myth in 1960. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As non-specialist researchers gain increasingly direct online access to digital and digitized theatre archives, archivists can no longer expect to be able to provide essential, post-positivist archival literacy training to individual researchers on a case-by-case basis. Archival literacy training must now be embedded directly into the design archives' online interfaces. In this paper, we make some preliminary suggestions about how the University of Guelph's L. W. Conolly Archive of Canadian Theatre may approach this challenge using the Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET) as a platform for interacting with its holdings. We illustrate our argument with artefacts related to Judith Thompson's White Biting Dog. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The archival strategies offered through the Dance Collections Danse (DCD) online database (based in Toronto) illuminate the emerging impulse to educate practitioners about archiving systems for the purpose of facilitating a more immediate organization of materials and information by the companies, choreographers, and dancers themselves. These strategies emphasize the importance of immediacy to the preservation of projects in theatrical dance, not only to avoid historical backtracking but also to generate a 'living' history and a sustainable method for presenting contemporary movements in theatrical dance as they arise. While the move to digital archiving evokes the desire to preserve dance as a fundamental part of Canadian arts and cultural heritage, it also presents challenges vis-à-vis negotiating the most effective way to document this ephemeral art form in both development and production. This paper sets out to interrogate the relationship between dance archiving, the preservation of dance history, and digital media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers how an ethnographer who studies heritage performance, in this case Me´tis fiddling and dancing, grapples with what is presented 'frontstage' in public settings. The author uses the dramaturgical metaphors first offered by Goffman (1959) and that MacCannell (1973, 1976) later expanded in the analysis of touristic spaces. Unlike MacCannell the author does not view such performances as totally contrived in order to cater to an audience's preconceptions. Furthermore, the heritage performances the author studies and the touristic spaces that fed into MacCannell's analysis differ; they include performances for insiders as well as performances offered up to those assumed outside or less familiar with the cultural traditions being performed. The author contends that understanding and interpreting such public discourse requires more than just a semiotic reading of what these performers do and say frontstage. What ethnography ideally reveals is the complexity of local, familial as well as broader socio-political histories and allegiances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Poland, the quality of life for Roma minorities has deteriorated in recent years due to negative stereotyping, economic crises and resurgent nationalisms. Consequently, many Roma have migrated to the west since Poland's 2004 entry into the EU. This has left several of Poland's Roma communities populated primarily by Roma elders unable to travel abroad due to their advanced age and/or poor health. This paper discusses the author's current research project that studies Polish elderly Roma women's experiences of ageing in the absence of younger relatives. In particular, the author explores the impact of the diverse attributes of non-public, non-collective dramatic storytelling on how the women constructed their narratives of ageing in the project. The author also considers the potential of dramatic storytelling sessions in relation to interviews, and explores how the two methodologies employed -intersecting with participant project goals and my own complicated local/global positionalities - shaped how the women constructed their stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Living Histories Theatre Ensemble (LHTE) is a socially-engaged improvisational theatre collective exploring the intersections of oral history and performance within a community-university research alliance entitled, 'Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by Genocide, War, and other Human Rights Violations.' This paper explores the LHTE's adaptations of Playback Theatre, and specifically the evolution of a technique called the 'Bridge', towards more fully reflecting values espoused within the Montreal Life Stories project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a documentary play in which actors represent living or historical people, textual artefact is replaced by creatively embodied document. Every stage of the construction of that document, from a subject's recall of events, to a researcher's transcription of the subject's testimony, to performance, is an act of improvisation. Reflecting on Nanay: a testimonial play, this paper examines the document as a necessarily creative construction. It describes improvisative decisions made at every stage of the rehearsal process, how they resulted in naturalistic or non-naturalistic staging, and how spectators and researchers correlated truth claims to the various theatrical genres employed. Referencing cognitive and event theories, Ferguson argues that the spectator engages with embodied performance somatically, and that “identification” based on mutual embodied encounter becomes critical to the spectator's acceptance or rejection of a documentary play's truth claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Ligue Nationale d'Improvisation (LNI), an improvisational theatre group that came into being in the late 1970s in Montreal and whose popularity spread quickly, mainly in the francophone world, has imported the structure and rules of hockey and adapted them to a format in which teams of actor-improvisers compete. This paper examines the ways in which the game of hockey has infused theatre improvisation with energy and vitality and why, in a Canadian and more particularly Québécois setting, the transposition of a sport like hockey is particularly loaded with cultural resonance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the International Puppet Festival organized by its founder Rosalynde Osborne Stearn as a festival for puppeteers, amateurs and professionals. The first puppet theatre festival was held in Hamilton, Ontario in May 1939 and consisted of a three-hour series of performances by selected groups with short papers presented during intermissions. Puppet artist and first president of the Puppeteers of America Paul McPharlin addressed the conference during dinner followed by a hand-puppet performance by puppet artist Walter Wilkinson.

The theoretical and practical concepts presented here pivot around the composition and design of an interactive audiovisual installation, presented at the Surrey Arts Centre in 200S: One River (running ⋯). This immersive media environment is a new form of participatory documentary that reflects the contemporary Surrey community it is presented in. This open composition takes advantage of a set of braided computational media and narrative processes as a dramatic model and integrates computation as a medium for composition, expanded immersive environment, performance and improvisation. The concept of braided processes provides a model for braided conversations and provides an open frame-work for describing an integrated relationship among various independent elements that comprise the complex media braid within the One River (running ⋯) environment and is discussed in detail in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author and his four close friends collaborated on a collective biographical performance project in late December of 2002 which resulted in a performance piece entitled "The Body Politic: Common Conversations on Gender and the Nation." This paper documents the process undertaken as they prepared to represent their personal and collective memories of immigration, integration and assimilation into Canada's multicultural mosaic. Biographical performance provides an art form and a platform for individuals marked as visible and invisible minorities. When it crosses and blurs the borders between separate minority discourses, it has the potential strategically to unsettle dominant interpretations of Canadian identity.

Presents a photo exhibition titled 'Pulp Fiction,' showing the works of two visual artists in community or labor arts. Artists' collaboration with various unions across the United States and Canada; Reasons for selecting community arts; Collection of stories from workers in paper and pulp mills in northeastern Ontario.